Excerpt from A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

To get to this apartment I exchanged some dollars at the booth outside baggage claim-it was about twenty-four rubles per dollar at the time-and took the brand-new express train to Savelovsky Railway Station, passing miles of crumbling Soviet apartment blocks, and the old (also crumbling) turn-of-the-century industrial belt just outside the center. Along the way the massive guy sitting next to me-about my age, in jeans and a short-sleeve button-down-struck up a conversation.

"What model is that?" he asked, about my phone. I had bought a SIM card at the airport and was now putting it in the phone and seeing if it worked.

Here we go, I thought. My phone was a regular T-Mobile flip phone.But I figured this was just a prelude to the guy trying to rob me. I grew tense. My hockey stick was in the luggage rack above us, and anyway it would have been hard to swing it at this guy on this train.

"Just a regular phone," I said. "Samsung." I grew up speaking Russian and still speak it with my father and my brother but I have a slight, difficult-to-place accent. I occasionally make small grammatical mistakes or put the stress on the wrong syllable. And I was rusty.

The guy picked up on this, as well as the fact that my olive skin set me apart from most of the Slavs on this fancy train. "Where you from?" he said. He used the familiar ty rather than vy--which could mean he was being friendly, because we were the same age and on the same train, or it could mean he was asserting his right to call me anything he wanted. I couldn't tell. He began to guess where I might be from. "Spain?" he said. "Or Turkey?"

Excerpted from A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen. Copyright © 2018 by Keith Gessen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.